A single bomb small enough to be concealed beneath an overcoat would have killed Stalin and perhaps the entire top rank of the Communist Party. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Stalin surely has more enemies who would like to see him dead than any man in the world except Hitler. Stalin probably has more personal enemies than Hitler, because Stalin has executed more people. When you think of the millions who died as victims of the Revolution, and of the millions who died in the famine of 1932-33, when Stalin ordered the peasants of the Ukraine to be stripped of all their food to teach them a lesson, it seems singular that no bereaved survivor should have lifted his hand against the tyrant. The first reason, however, why a modern despot enjoys relative security is the character of totalitarian terror. In a normal democratic country an assassin has to fear only the loss of his own life, and the lives of his immediate conspirators, if any. In Russia, after Kirov’s death, Stalin executed in this wise: First, 103 persons who were not even accused of having had anything to do with the assassination but had been held in jail for various political offenses. This was simply the first gesture of the Terror, intended to shock the country. Then as the police rounded up Nikolaev’s family, friends, and acquaintances, and read his diary, they came to know virtually every human being Nikolaev had known during his whole life. Every one of these persons was arrested and after being squeezed dry of information was executed; at any rate they all disappeared. But that was only the beginning. The purges which were occasioned, not caused, by the Kirov killing lasted about four years, from 1935 to 1938 inclusive. The Purge became so huge that Nikolaev was forgotten, but before the G.P.U. finished with the Nikolaev complex, they had liquidated in this wise: Every relative of Nikolaev to the third cousins; every acquaintance of Nikolaev and every acquaintance of an acquaintance of Nikolaev, and every acquaintance of every acquaintance of every acquaintance of Nikolaev. You think this is an exaggeration? Not at all. The number of executions ran into thousands. Now what would be the effect upon a would-be assassin, if, as he contemplated his deed, he reflected that as a consequence of his killing Stalin, not merely would he himself be executed, but every human being in the world with whom he had ever come in contact? Man experiences the world largely as a series of contacts with other men. Suppose the assassin knew by just such an experience as the Russian people had in the case of the killing of Kirov, that his entire world would be blotted out if he went on with his plans. Would not this deter almost any man?